When you wake up, walk downstairs and drink a cup of coffee, do you notice the design of the mug? How the curve fits your hand, and think about how many revisions someone must have gone through before they were finally happy with what they created. Most people overlook design in their everyday life. But taking your time to inspect things like a coffee mug or your chair, you will notice differences. Differences like in lids of coffee cups, where Tim Hortons has a very short lid, where Starbucks has a much higher lid. This is because Starbucks has a higher tendency of adding things like whip cream to their drinks, where Tim hortons servers more straight coffee. Designers create things to fit certain situations. To simply create one lid to use for every company wouldn’t work, it would become obsolete. I asked Tim Brown, the CEO of the designing company IDEO what he thought the reason to keep designing today was. He explained that even if we have nothing left to design, we can always design things differently. We can always improve on what we have created. One article that explains our goal to improve and adapt is “Why cities are full of uncomfortable benches” by Carlos Waters. His article explains how many cities have designed new benches to deter people from sleeping on them. This is called defensive design. It is seen all around cities from adding spikes on roofs to stop birds from spreading disease, to the benches around the cities. Waters explains that as the homeless population increases, more people are left to sleep on benches and sidewalks instead of going to homeless shelters. Designing new city furniture like the leaning bench, lets normal use like having a place to rest while waiting for a bus still happen, but deters unwanted loitering around busy city areas. Design plays a strong role in helping and controlling the public, but also impacts consumer markets. One of the biggest flops in recent years was Adidas Springblades. These shoes had large blade-like plastic soles on the bottom, and cost over $150 when first released. Adidas lost huge amounts of money on the shoes, not including their failure to sue Skechers after they released blatant ripoffs of the technology. Now most stock of these shoes was either thrown out or sold at a huge discount. So what happened? When they were first released, the Spring Blades were regarded as “Perfect mix between design and performance”. They failed after many shoes began to break because of weaker plastic, and many soles falling off. Soon Adidas released their second line of Boost shoes, soon stealing many marketing campaigns, and leaving the old shoe out of the spotlight. Because of poor design, Adidas lost a lot of money, and wasted many consumers time and money. I love looking at design. Every Sunday, I go out to garage sales, flea markets hunting for Eames chairs, old bikes, and anything that just amazes me. Each piece is like a painting of hard work, sweat, and tears the designer put into an idea they had, and made it work. It amazes me how much effort people put into design, and as I pursue to become an Industrial Designer, I hope someone else will appreciate the hard work I put in too.